INTERVIEW
People at my church were
talking about The Pilgrim's
Progress by John Bunyan, so
I asked for it for Christmas.
That book changed my life. It
single-handedly got me interested in reading older literature, which eventually drew
me back to the Reformation
and people like Martin Luther
and John Calvin. I ordered
Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, and that hooked
me on Calvin.
Later I was attending church
with an RTS Jackson student
who was pursuing ministry interests. I wasn't thinking along
the lines of becoming a minister, but about doing work that
would allow me to keep reading these authors I enjoyed so
much. So I ended up attending RTS Jackson, where I met
people like Dr. Ligon Duncan
and Dr. Duncan Rankin, who
had a huge impact on steering
me more toward older writers.
They were also very generous
in talking with me about my
36 Ministry & Leadership
interests in doing a Ph.D. and
teaching as a profession.
In researching the Reformation,
what have you discovered that
has surprised you most?
Primarily it relates to the
humanity of the people I'm
studying. People tend to think
of Luther, Calvin, Huldrych
Zwingli and the others we hear
about as people who didn't
have any problems, almost as
if they weren't human. But
Calvin, for example, had a terrible temper that really made
him an unpleasant person to
be around. Martin Bucer was
willing to stretch the truth
when he thought the occasion called for it. Zwingli was
incredibly funny - the records of the 1523 disputation
in Zürich will say quite often,
"The crowd is laughing right
now," or "Zwingli made a joke
about Martin Luther, and his
opponents are laughing." If
you read much about Luther,
he clearly suffered from de-
pression on and off throughout
his entire life.
Those sorts of things not only
are surprising, but they are
pleasantly surprising. You end
up realizing these were normal people who nonetheless
ended up doing extraordinary
things.
On a related note, what are the
most common misconceptions
about the Reformation?
Probably the biggest misconception is that we think the
Reformers aren't human, that
they dropped out of a spaceship, having no relation to the
world around them and no
experience of the sorts of peculiar situations you and I find
ourselves in every day. But
when you research the Reformation, you find first of all that
the Reformers were hugely
influenced by their own day:
the Middle Ages. It affected
the way they thought about
theology, their reading of the
Bible, and their views toward
women, other religions, the future, etc.
A second common misconception is that the religion
practiced during the Reformation period was pure and
pristine in a way we don't
experience today; that the
people to whom the Reformers preached were an incredibly godly group of people who
hardly ever sinned. In reality,
they preached to spiritually
weak, impoverished, disobedient people. Calvin used to have
to deal with someone who
skipped church and would
stand outside hitting a tennis ball against the wall of
St. Pierre's Cathedral (where
he was preaching) to annoy
him. Calvin's brother, Antoine,
went through a messy divorce;
Antoine's wife was tortured by
the Genevan authorities to try
to get her to confess her adultery, but she refused to.
Another misconception is
that all the Reformers basically believed the same stuff
www.rts.edu
Fall 2017

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